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Plus's sister project boosts Maths in London's toughest schools

The NRICH project, a sister project of Plus, will be running a $1.2 million initiative to boost the teaching of maths for thousands of school students in London's most deprived areas. Over a hundred of the4se students will be given the chance to study on residential courses at the University of Cambridge.

The Goldman Sachs Foundation, a philanthropic arm of the global investment bank Goldman Sachs, has awarded the University of Cambridge a grant of $1.2 million. It will enable the University to develop and to deliver training to hundreds of maths teachers working in some of the UK's most disadvantaged schools. Through the resources provided to support teachers' classroom practice, this partnership could benefit up to 15,000 London school students annually.

The funding will also give 120 GCSE-age school pupils the chance to study maths in Cambridge through intensive residential courses. Each student will attend three residential workshops, running for a week each, over a one year period. These students will also undertake on-line courses supported by Cambridge staff and undergraduate mentors.

Lesley Gannon, Head of Widening Participation at the University of Cambridge, said, "This is the first time that the University of Cambridge has been funded to run subject-specific residential courses over such a lengthy period. This will allow us to work intensively with hundreds of disadvantaged students to develop their mathematical and problem solving skills and to raise aspirations."

The new programme will launch in September 2008, and will be run by two award-winning divisions of the University of Cambridge: NRICH, which is part of the Millennium Mathematics Project and a sister project of Plus, and the Group to Encourage Ethnic Minority Applications (GEEMA), which is part of the Widening Participation Team in the Cambridge Admissions Office.

The NRICH website has been providing free on-line resources as part of the Millennium Mathematics Project for almost a decade. The aim of Millennium Mathematics is to provide top-quality enrichment activities for maths students nationally and internationally.

The new programme is aimed at GCSE-age students from groups and communities currently under-represented in higher education in general and in research-led institutions in particular.

The programme will be aimed at students from disadvantaged areas in inner-city London, and teachers from the same areas. Many London boroughs are among the most deprived socio-economic areas in the UK, with school students in these areas facing enormous hurdles.

Priority will be given to students who:

Are the first generation in their family to attend university

Have parents in non-professional occupations

Are from minority ethnic backgrounds currently under-represented in HE

Attend a school with a low overall GCSE A*-C average and/or with a low overall A-level point score

Attend a school with a high proportion of free school meals

Attend a school with a low proportion of students going on to higher education

Nationally, mathematics faces severe challenges, which the Government commissioned 2004 Smith Inquiry into 14-19 Mathematics Education described as a "crisis in the teaching and learning of mathematics in England". The inquiry identified "deep concern about the supply of appropriately qualified mathematics teachers in secondary schools and colleges”. It also expressed concern that many young people perceived maths as “boring and irrelevant” and “too difficult, compared with other subjects".

Dr Jennifer Piggott, Director of NRICH: "This is an exciting opportunity to share some of our enjoyment of mathematics with communities such as the one I grew up in myself in Hackney, and we're very grateful to the Goldman Sachs Foundation for their generous grant. For us on the NRICH team, the evaluation component of the programme funding will also allow us to assess the impact and effect of working with students and teachers in this way, and we're therefore also looking forward to learning from the programme ourselves."

Stephanie Bell-Rose, President of The Goldman Sachs Foundation, said, "The Goldman Sachs Foundation supports initiatives that give promising young people from underserved backgrounds access to programs that will help them develop the academic and leadership skills needed to succeed in leading universities and, ultimately, in their careers. Quantitative skills are critical to their educational and professional success, and we are pleased to support this effort to improve the teaching and learning of mathematics in the United Kingdom."

Plus in Nature Network

Plus has teamed up with science journal giant Nature to bring maths to the Nature networking site. Nature Networks was set up quite recently to provide a global stage for science discussion, allowing scientists to meet, interact, comment on the latest news, debate
current topics or exchange information. Members can create groups for their own labs or organisations, or for their own subject area.

The mathematics forum is now brought to you by Plus. We're aiming to provide a platform for anyone who wants to discuss maths, whether it's actual maths, maths teaching, the portrayal of maths in the media, or good and bad maths content elsewhere on the internet.

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Excel 2007 Bug

Microsoft Excel is the back of the envelope for the modern problem solver. If a problem can't be solved in a few cells and perhaps a pivot table, then perhaps it's a problem best left alone — or left for the mathematicians in any case.

As such, recent news of a calculation bug in Excel 2007 has caused quite a stir.

In a blog post, Microsoft employee David Gainer reported that there are occasions where, when the result of a multiplication should be 65535, Excel instead displays 100000 as the answer.

You can try this yourself. Multiply 77.1 by 850, 10.2 by 6425 and 20.4 by 3212.5.

"Further testing showed a similar phenomenon with 65,536 as well," Gainer blogged.

According to Gainer, Excel gets the calculation correct but does not display it. The bug is limited to six numbers from 65,534.99999999995 to 65,535, and six numbers from 65,535.99999999995 to 65,536.

Microsoft have released a hotfix for the problem that can be downloaded and it will be included in the the first service pack update of the program.

Dan B, a Microsoft employee, commented on the Microsoft blog that:

"We're not planning to share details on this beyond what we've already communicated — i.e. that the issue occurred in formatting of floating point numbers near 65,565 and 65,536. It was code that we introduced as part of the calculation overhaul that we did for Excel 2007 however."

The problem seems to be an error in the 64-bit floating-point to string conversion routine. You can read more about this on the Microsoft blog.

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For more clear details about this Bug, I can refer you a link which would give details about this bug, which is by the head of Microsoft Ireland.
link:http://blogs.technet.com/daven/archive/2007/09/27/issue-in-excel-2007-and-excel-services-2007-involving-calculation-of-numbers-around-65-535.aspx

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Industrial Mathematics Internships

The Industrial Mathematics Internship, a joint program run by The Smith Institute and the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC), was launched at the Institute of Engineering and Technology (IET) on the 18th of September 2007.

The Internship is a way for companies and university research groups to promote direct knowledge exchange and develop long-term working relationships through engaging a dedicated postgraduate researcher to work on a specific industrial project over a period of 3 to 6 months.

The Smith Institute manages the Knowledge Transfer Network for Industrial Mathematics (KTN) and hopes that the program will inject fresh energy into UK businesses by bringing cutting-edge techniques to business innovation and by developing long-term working relationships between companies and universities.

Each Internship is a collaboration between a host company, an intern, and a research group within a university. Industrialists can improve existing, or develop new, operations through the impact of mathematical expertise. Universities can grow new industrial collaborations and relationships, whilst interns can gain first-hand experience of the business environment.

A pilot phase of the initiative will run between September 2007 and August 2008 and will establish 6 Internships. Each Internship will last between 3 and 6 months and will be supported by one of the KTN's Technology Translators, who will assist in establishing the projects, building the relationships, exploiting follow-on opportunities and disseminating a final case study through the
industrial mathematics community.

Dr Tim Bradshaw, Head of Innovation, Science and Technology at the CBI, said, "The Industrial Mathematics Internships programme is an excellent example of how business and universities can collaborate for mutual benefit — helping businesses become more innovative and successful by making effective use of skills and knowledge developed in universities while at the same time providing extremely
valuable experience for postgraduate researchers. The critical component is that researchers will work on finding solutions to real business problems, something for which the Smith Institute already has an excellent reputation."

Further details on Industrial Mathematics Internships can be found on the KTN web site.

If you would like to apply for an Internships or simply discuss a project idea, please contact Dr Claudia Centazzo at the Smith Institute.

You can also visit the blog by Trevor Maynard from Lloyd's Exposure Management.